Monday, October 3, 2011

AWA 2011 Recap: Part I (Thu & Fri)

I spent this past weekend at Anime Weekend Atlanta, which is, big surprise, in Atlanta, GA. I've spent most of the last month working on finishing up my new zodiac set for this convention along with preparing the Anime Tarot set as a deck of cards. Most of last week was spent preparing for the convention, along the lines of cutting out and laminating badges and bookmarks and finishing writing, printing, cutting out, assembling and packaging the booklet for the Anime Tarot deck. I also put together a last-minute Fluttershy costume from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. With all that going on, is it really any surprise that I wasn't ready when my cousin showed up at my house at 6:00pm Thursday evening to leave for the convention?

This is what was supposed to happen: I would finish laminating badges in the morning, and then I would finish up my friend's boot-covers for her Azula costume. I would still have several hours to pack up everything. I would have the van packed with our stuff (our being me, my husband, and Ty), and as soon as my cousin got in, we'd load the van up with her stuff and head out of town to meet my husband near Charlotte where he works (we live in the Raleigh, NC area).

What actually happened: My cousin called at 5ish to let me know she'd be here in about an hour. I had barely 1/3 of the laminating finished--that had turned into a much more tedious process than I'd planned. I decided that maybe I could get the boot-covers finished in 30 minutes, and then pack everything in the remaining 30 minutes. Heh... that was a good joke. After 50 minutes, I gave up on the boot covers; I'd made a couple of mistakes in my haste that were fixable, but not within the frame of time I had to work with, so I called my friend and asked her to pack a pair of boots that would work as an alternative since the boot-covers were not happening for AWA. That left... 5 minutes to pack by the time I got off the phone. Yeah, that wasn't going to happen. My cousin got here, and we spent the next hour collecting things, packing them, and then loading them into the car.

So, at around 7:00pm, we pulled away from my driveway and left to meet my husband. We stopped for fast-food to-go for dinner, and about 2.5 hours later, we met up with my husband. The next stop was to pick up my friend (the one cosplaying Azula whose boot-covers I screwed up). Her house was about an hour away from where my husband worked, but it was on the way to Atlanta, so that wasn't too bad. What was bad was 10 minutes down the road we came across a nasty accident that blocked the road entirely and police were directing traffic to turn around. After a super-long detour, we finally picked up my friend at a little after midnight. Thankfully the rest of the drive to Atlanta was less eventful, but because of the delays, we didn't pull into the hotel until 4:00am--the original ETA had been 1:00-1:30am. Seriously, there's a reason our group's nicknamed Team Sidequest. We don't necessarily go looking for trouble (although sometimes we do); it just tends to find us.

The drive there was long and tiring. We got checked in and everything hauled up to our room by 4:45 and crashed. I was up at 7:00. You remember how I mentioned that I was only 1/3 of the way through laminating everything; well, I had to get up Friday morning to finish the laminating before I needed to head downstairs to check into Artist Alley. Ok, I suppose I could have slept late and just dealt with starting late, but I guess I'm really stubborn about making the most out of the time I had there. If I wanted to spend my weekend sleeping, I could have just stayed at home. =P

Given that I only had about 2 hours of sleep, I don't remember a lot from Friday. XD A lot of it blurs together. We got the table set up. I meant to get a picture of it, but I kind of forgot... XD I had all of my art stuff out, minus the individual prints and badges for the tarot card set. My cousin had a bunch of her really adorable polymer cake charms out, too, and Ty even had a couple of little beaded "tassels" that he made. I didn't leave the table much Friday. I did go with my friend to watch the first two episodes of Ouran High School Host Club live action Friday evening. It was epic and horrible, all at the same time. I want to find more of it to watch.

I spent most of the day working on one commission--lineart of Starscream and Megatron. I've never been a big Transformer (or any kind of mecha) fan, and if you're familiar with my gallery, you'll know I don't draw much of that. It was still a good challenge--it took me a lot longer than a normal drawing would have, but it was definitely good practice. Friday night we all went to bed pretty much as soon as the Artist Alley closed. It's dinner time now, and I'm not going to count on getting back to the computer tonight, so, I'll post the recap for Saturday and Sunday tomorrow. I got a photograph of the Transformer commission, so I'll post that tomorrow too.